Page 48 of Regret Me Not
Pierce sat up like he’d been stung. “Was there? Was there ever going to be a boom?”
Hal rolled his eyes. “Cool your jets, panic man. I was going todrinkmyself to death—and I told you how that ended. No. There was not going to be a boom.”
Pierce settled back down into the couch, but now his hands were shaking and clammy, and his pleasant Christmas doze felt shattered.
Hal sighed, took his hand, and kissed it. “Shh… it’s just this night, baby. Just you and me and this movie and Christmas. Watch the movie. Hold me tight. You’ll feel the Christmas thing—I promise. And the sun is exactly where it’s supposed to be. I swear.”
Pierce nodded, soothed by his words, by his soft kiss on the palm of Pierce’s hand—and by the sweet movie that both of them quoted as it played.
“Did you hope?” Hal asked toward the middle of the movie.
“Hope for what?”
“That the guy fromWalking Deadwould find a guy instead of a girl?”
Pierce chuckled. “Well he found Daryl!”
“I meant inthismovie.”
Pierce thought about it. “No,” he answered at last. “I was too busy hoping the girl with the brother didn’t answer the phone.”
Hal grunted. “Why?”
“Because the people you love should never get in the way of the people you love.”
Hal was quiet for a moment, lying sideways with his head on Pierce’s lap. “You could be the best person I’ve ever met,” he said.
Pierce stroked his hair back from his face, his heart so full in that moment he couldn’t hear the incessant crashing of the surf. “Not even close—shh… it’s the part with the Dido song….”
They watched the movie, entranced, and then Hal stood up from the couch and offered him a hand up. Pierce stood, and Hal cupped his cheeks, giving him a brief kiss.
“Go undress,” he said, giving orders naturally. “Pull down the duvet and lie on your side. I’ve got an idea.”
Pierce shuddered, thinking he might know what this particular idea entailed. If he was right, it was agoodidea, and he wanted to be a part of it.
He walked his newly loosened body into the bedroom, stripping out of his sleep shorts, boxers, and T-shirt, and unlike getting the massage, he suddenly feltverynaked, andverysexual.
And in spite of the scars on his body, the silver strands of hair on his head, the lines in the corners of his green eyes, he didn’t feel old and wrecked, as he had when he’d arrived here.
He felt young and desirable and in desperate need of whatever Hal wanted to dish out tonight.
He lay down on the bed on his side—not facing the end table, like Hal probably expected, but facing the center of the bed.
Hal finished turning off the lights and locking up and walked into the bedroom shucking clothes, dropping them in his usual pile next to the bed. He looked up and caught Pierce’s eyes on him.
“What?”
“I was remembering that first night. In the dark. How you didn’t even want to talk about it.”
“I was afraid,” Hal told him quietly, crawling to the middle of the bed so he could talk to Pierce eye to eye. “I wanted you so bad—so bad. But you were so… so angry. Closed off. Hurt. I thought maybe if we just kept it us, in the dark, you’d let it happen.”
Pierce closed his eyes and savored how far they’d come. “I don’t want you in the dark,” he said. “I want… I want to walk down the street with you. I want to introduce you to everyone I know. I—”
Hal put two fingers on his lips. “I want you,” he whispered. “All of you. Now roll over and turn off the light.”
Pierce did, staying on his side and facing away from Hal’s amber eyes.
Hal’s hands—his magic hands—skated over Pierce’s shoulders, his arms, his side, and Hal pressed up against Pierce’s back, aggressively naked. The thought of him—all of him—lined up against Pierce’s bare back sent a shiver of recognition, of arousal zinging through Pierce’s body.
